Re: Corona Virus: is it the beginning of the end?
A few fun facts:
First, I'm ridiculously proud of my dad and stepmother at the moment. My dad is sixty-one, my stepmother fifty-five. Both of them grumble about the wearing of masks, but both of them do it anyway.
My stepmother cleans houses, and has said on more than one occasion that if she gets even a little bit sick, she will keep her clients safe and will stay away; she wears a mask on the job, but she refuses to take chances. She's overweight, has reactive asthma and is not in the best of shape, but has never once said that a mask in any way inhibits her while working.
My dad is one of those no-nonsense practical men fairly typical of his generation. He thinks that masks are uncomfortable, but when he goes out in public (to the store, to pump gas, to pick up food from a restaurant) he wears a mask anyway. He's a smoker with a pack-a-day habit, more or less, and he's also got chronic bronchitis and a mild heart condition. He's got bad knees, a bad back and wrecked hands, so he's in pain all the time. Instead of howling about how masks are impinging upon his rights, he just gets on and does it, because I guess he realizes that it helps make other people safe and may actually keep him a bit safer since he's at slightly higher risk than your average person.
I dunno. I hung out with them over the weekend and had a chance to chat with them, and it was extremely refreshing to see people of that generation who straight-up get what we're dealing with. It did make me sadder for all the folks who don't, however.
Another thing, not really related to my family. The Canadian federal government denied the Blue Jays access to Toronto during the regular season. My first reaction was annoyance, but then I thought about it, and realized that they did the right things. Sports are not essential, and if home games in Toronto had been approved, we'd have had hundreds of personnel from the States crossing and recrossing the border over and over again. Why should we expose our country to that level of risk for baseball, or for anything else? In point of fact, most Canadians want the American border to stay shut for the rest of 2020, and the reason why is fairly obvious. While there are definitely people in Canada who are resistant to the mask issue, or who think it's a hoax, it's nowhere near as polarizing as it is in the United States. Most Canadians I've spoken to - we're talking dozens here, and most of them aren't leftists - have come to the reluctant conclusion that most of America has lost its mind over this mask issue by making it political. Me, I'm just glad we won't have floods of Americans crossing and recrossing our border. Our progress may be tenuous, but it's actually progress; I'd hate for that progress to be ruined by folks who don't feel they ought to do anything to keep other people safe.
A lot of stuff is opening up again here, but at reduced capacity. I'm okay with that. I do think it's time to try something like this, because as necessary as shutdowns might have originally been, they really nailed small businesses, and people do have to eat. That said, if we notice another big spike, we may have to hunker down and wait out the storm again. I...really hope that doesn't happen, here or anywhere, and since wearing masks will help that not happen, I'd say the logic is pretty airtight.
On a mostly unrelated note, I believe that critical thinking should be a mandatory part of the Canadian and American school curriculum starting in approximately seventh or eighth grade. The amount of blindly partisan action is absolutely mind-blowing in these two countries (and in other places, I'm sure). I think it's vital that folks learn how to think, instead of just being told -what to think and trusting it because it comes from a comfortable source. There's a reason why, in previous debates in this thread, I've been able to cite sources and come up with nonpartisan and reasonably rational discourse with very little effort. It's because I try to think as broadly as I can, to analyze what I'm told and to weigh costs, benefits, drawbacks and such as empirically as possible. For example, I might see discomfort as a valid reason to consider not wearing a mask, but as a criterion, it's extremely weak next to things like safety and civic responsibility...so yeah, it counts, but not for much. I wish it were stressed more in school, because right now it's not. It makes me sad that I'm glad that our borders are shut, but that's the state we're in.
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